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America on the eve of the New Deal: They're still mad about this

Posted Monday night, November 27, 2017.

The divide FDR had to try to close, Trump widens and exploits:

During the 1920s, for the first time in the country’s history, more Americans began living in cities of populations of 100,000 or more than in small towns and on farms. The transformation of the nation into a primarily urban society threatened rural folks who aggressively supported ideas and traditions largely in harmony with their established way of life. The adoption of the Eighteenth Amendment in 1919 was as much a rejection of city habits as it was of demon liquor. As the historian Richard Hofstadter observed, Prohibition “was linked not merely to an aversion to drunkenness and to the evils that accompanied it, but to the immigrant drinking masses, to the pleasures and amenities of city life…It was carried about America by the rural-evangelical virus.”